Tuesday, June 29, 2010

When men need to get together to do manly things, one of the jobs of women is to understand this without pitching a bitch about it. If a man needs a woman's permission to be a man, then she isn't fit to be his woman.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

"Those people treated me with extraordinary friendship. One man attached himself to me as soon as I entered the hut, spread down new mats for me to sit on, gave me fish, berries, roots, etc. All the men of the other houses came and smoked with me. In the evening an old woman presented in a bowl made of light-colored horn, a kind of syrup made of made of dried berries which the natives call shele-well. They gave me a kind of soup made of bread of the shele-well berries mixed with roots, which they present in neat trenchers made of wood."

~ said of the Clatsop Indians by William Clark, December 9th, 1805

"I gave Sergeant Pryor his instructions and a letter to Mr. Haney... with a view to engage Mr. Haney to prevail on some of the best-informed and most influential chiefs of the different bands of Sioux to accompany us to the seat of our government, with a view to let them see our population and resources, which I believe is the surest guarantee of savage fidelity to any nation -- that of a government possessing the power of punishing promptly every aggression."

~ William Clark, July 23rd, 1806

Mass grave of dead Lakota after Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890

Before there was ever an "America," this was a land of many nations. Having nearly destroyed them all, it is only a matter of time before the scales of justice are balanced. When a government is built on crushing peoples' souls, its own fate will follow accordingly.

As well it should.

"Time evolves and comes to a place where it renews again. There is first a purification time and then there's renewal time. We are getting very close to this time now. We were told that we would see America come and go. In a sense, America is dying -- from within, because we forgot the instructions of how to live on Earth."

Thursday, June 24, 2010

If you avoid breaking laws and do what you're told and ignore the poor, the oppressed and the downtrodden - you probably won't be bothered. If you try to right what is wrong, however, you will surely meet great opposition and run the risk of imprisonment or death.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

"Whilst I viewed those mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the -- heretofore conceived -- boundless Missouri. But when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific Ocean, and the sufferings and hardship of myself and party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them. But, as I have always held it little short of criminality to anticipate evils, I will allow it to be a good, comfortable road until I am compelled to believe otherwise."

Saturday, June 19, 2010

I was born upon a prairie where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls.

For those who don't know, this was the end of the trail for Lewis & Clark. Formerly known as Fort Canby (which I prefer) it is now Cape Disappointment. It was the first place I ever camped in Washington, and I have since been back many times over the years. It's been too long since my last visit, so off I go... My site is right next to the beach on the far side of the cliff in this photo. Sunday night I'll fall asleep to the sound of the ocean and say "thank you" for all the special memories and beautiful places in my life that I'm lucky enough to experience before I die.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

"A hurricane builds energy as it moves across the ocean, sucking up warm, moist tro­pical air from the surface and dispensing cooler air aloft. Think of this as the storm breathing in and out. The hurricane escalates until this "breathing" is disrupted, like when the storm makes landfall. At this point, the storm quickly loses its momentum and power, but not without unleashing wind speeds as high as 185 mph (300 kph) on coastal areas."

~ How Stuff Works

Now imagine a hurricane that sucks up all that oil in the Gulf, throws it aloft and then slams into the coast, covering everything in goo... No one will be singing in the rain, that's for sure.

As long as we're going to use oil, we should be drilling onshore rather than offshore. If this disaster had happened on land, I think it'd have been less damaging and easier to contain. Oil and natural gas production is found on less than one percent of the 262 million acres controlled by the BLM. The more people protest domestic onshore drilling, the more oil production will be pushed to extreme places where the risks are higher and the consequences more dire. Part of environmental responsibility is weighing our options and choosing the one that does the least damage in the event of a catastrophe.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

For as long as I can remember my favorite car has always been the Ford Model T. As I kid I simply thought it looked cool, and I still do. I think I would have liked living back then and discovering the countryside from behind the wheel of one. It's funny to think there was a time when no American knew how to drive, but I bet it would have been fun to be one of the first to learn how.

Regarded as the first affordable automobile, the Ford Model T opened up travel for the common middle class American. Being one myself, and also a guy who likes road trips, that's something I can appreciate. I like that Ford paid his workers a wage proportionate to the cost of the cars they built for him so they could each have one themselves. With four months wages, a man could proudly drive home in a car he himself had helped build.

Ford said, "I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one—and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."

Compared to today's standards, Ford's common sense is astounding. Notice his vision includes hiring "the best men," not the tired huddled masses of wretched refuse, as are the sort championed in Emma Lazarus' "famous" poem. There's nothing wrong with being tired or wretched (I've been there), but I don't think there's any virtue to specifically targeting that type of person to come to your country or work for your company. I'm pretty sure the two Hungarian immigrants who designed the Model T were of a fundamentally different character. Simple designs, good materials and affordability are concepts that make a lot more sense than slaving away to pay off a 5-year loan for an overpriced piece of complicated, foreign built high-tech crap that is purposely designed to be difficult to work on and obsolete by the time it's paid for.

One version of the Model T was run on ethyl alcohol, to be made at home by the self-reliant farmer. That same idea applied today might be to run cars on electricity made from solar panels at the homes of self-reliant city dwellers. My emphasis here isn't on the particular technical solution, but on the thinking behind it, because I believe it's that type of thinking that can help unfuck America. It's not that we go backward, it's that we move forward by taking the good ideas from the past with us. Cars just don't have to be cars. We can build them to do other things. Some of Ford's cars, for example, were put to work on the farm, jacked up and used to power other belt-driven equipment. Certainly this same concept can be updated for the cars and the needs of the modern driver today.

A friend of mine once told me, "You don't like change." I started to argue the point and then thought about it, realizing that in a way he was right. I don't like changing simple, reliable things that work simply to create more complicated crap that doesn't. I also don't like being charged more for it when the older, more affordable stuff worked just fine. There's no need for it. The only thing that is served by building junk is the greed of unprincipled people who screw the working class instead of helping them improve their individual lives to make the country better.

Ford's ideology was "get it right and keep it the same." He did, and it worked -- so well that he didn't need to buy (waste money on) any advertising between 1917 and 1923 because his stuff was good enough to speak for itself. By 1925 his cars were just under $2700 in today's money. That's a fair price -- certainly better than a 2010 Hyundai Accent which costs $8000 more.

I'm not sure what the answers are, but I know where to look for the spirit that gives rise to them. It's a certain attitude and sense of life mixed with competent, sensible craftsmanship. Ford's cars were so durable that many of them and their parts were still in running order nearly a century later. Reading about the man who built them puts me in contact with a force I don't really have words for, but it gives me a proud feeling, one that feels like a path to a vision of what we could be. America is our vehicle. We should think of it as a Model T, where T stands for truth, and build a country that lasts.